Water-carbon Footprint Accounting And Scenerio Simulation Studyof China’s Regions And Industrial Sectors

The rapid growth of China’s economy has caused many serious environmental problems, among which, regional water scarcities and high carbon emissions are two major concerns. This two systems hold many similar characteristics and are correlated with each other, thus studying this two issues in one uniformed framework can identify the relationships between them, and avoid negative water-carbon trade-offs. Previous evaluating methods paid much attention to production-based water consumptions and carbon emissions, however, water consumptions and carbon emissions are also affected by other consumption-based factors, which is also of great importance. Thus, an Environment-extended Multi-Regional Input-Output framework was built in this study to jointly analyze provincial and sectoral water-carbon footprintsin China.The results showed that there existed great provincialdisparities among rich and poor regions in terms of water and carbon intensities in major sectors in China. Besides, per capital water and carbon footprints in coastal and developed provinces were 2-5 times higher than western and inland provinces resulting from consumption levels, trades and technological developments. Trades posed great impacts on water distribution and carbon emissions in different provinces. Developed regions including Shanghai, Guangdong and Beijing relied heavily on external virtual water supplies, while at the same time, enormous amount of carbon emissions were also shifted from these developed regions to poorer ones, thus aggravating environmental pressures in the later provinces. Further detailed analysis was conducted to evaluated water-carbon footprints saving potentials in power and construction sectors. This study found that ?increasing the shares of renewable energy‘ can achieve water-carbon co-saving from life-cycle views. In construction sector, we qualified that if the average life ages could be extended from the current 25.2 years to 50 years, China can save water consumption and carbon emission of a medium-sized European country in just 2011.